Safari Photography: A Guide to Working in Black and White

You may be wondering: why on earth would you choose black and white for safari photography?

Cobalt blue skies, vibrant orange sunsets, jewel-colored birds, the luxuriant greens of riverine habitats, the rich golden tones of the savannah in sweet light, the purples, violets, and soft pinks of a pre-dawn African sky; not forgetting all that nature ‘red’ in tooth and claw.

Surely we wouldn’t suggest black and white as a ‘go-to’ for safari photographers when there’s that tempting color palette to play with?

We are. Black and white photography can have bags of impact. When subjects and conditions are suitable, it can produce the best results – even on a safari.

Read more: How to Photograph Wildlife in Black and White

Why use black and white in safari photography

Ask any fine art wildlife photographer working in Africa, and they’ll list the ways black and white helps them intensify the beauty and grandeur of iconic African game species; gifting images a stark simplicity and classic elegance.

There are certainly few better routes to magnifying mood in a wildlife image.

If you want to get ahead of the game (no pun intended), in a world where competition for attention is high, we’d suggest there’s reward in subverting viewers’ expectations that color reigns supreme; the notion that it’s simply not ‘natural’ to showcase the natural world without color.

Rejecting the rainbow safari shades on safari can often reap rewards. African wildlife is much photographed, but it’s much less photographed in black and white.

Shunning color in your safari photography can be liberating. Without its distraction, those moments on safari when you want to express more directly the full-on emotional intensity of thrilling animal encounters can often be more powerfully conveyed.

With more emphasis on contrast and tone, there’s often an appealing nuance in black and white wildlife imagery. We reckon it permits us to be less literal and that bit more creative.

On a more mundane level, there are also valid practical reasons for shooting in monochrome on occasions on your trip.

The age-old problem of isolating wildlife subjects from a confused or clashing background, to name just one, can often be solved or simplified by rendering your shot in mono.

You can also frequently extend shooting times if you switch to monochrome and continue making winning images outside the golden light zones.

The key is knowing when to make the switch from color and how to maximize those ‘mono moments.’ Encouragingly, you don’t need any extra kit for black and white, although being open to its potential will help you.

Read more: 12 Ways to Evoke Emotion in Your Wildlife Photos

The monochrome mindset

There’s a common assumption black and white is something to fall back on when you can’t otherwise get a picture to work on a game drive, or a ‘fix’ to elevate a poor shot later in post-processing.

Black and white photography is an art, not a case of ‘sticking on a plaster.’ For success, it needs to be a deliberate and desired aesthetic approach.

In our view, monochrome images speak more directly when your vision is ‘baked in’ as much as possible at the point of capture – the decisive moment – with necessary framing and exposure adjustments made as near as possible to the picture’s initial conception.

For success, this hinges on an important skill – the ability to pre-visualize shots in black and white. Don’t feel daunted, this is something you can train yourself to do even in the space of your trip.

Top Tip: Remember you can always set the picture style on your camera to monochrome and use Live View, or check the LED display to preview your shot in mono until you get a feel for this. In some cameras, you may need to shoot in RAW + JPEG to see the preview image in black and white.

Your photo guide on safari can also help by flagging up situations and subjects that might benefit from a black and white treatment with advice as you go on settings and framing options.

If you’re super keen to try some black and white shots, don’t be a shrinking violet; let your guide know at the start of your trip so they can help you achieve some great results from the get-go.

Best safari subjects for black and white photography

Black and white is all about distinct contrast – juxtaposing darker and lighter tones for a powerful visual effect.

Until it becomes second nature to think in black and white, it will help to keep a mental checklist of the subjects that might lend themselves well to a mono treatment at the front of your mind on game drives.

Some will be obvious. Zebras are a gift for black and white with their crazy barcode skin patterns. The same goes for giraffes; the patchwork of their hides, like dark tiling picked out by white grouting, have long been favorite black and white subjects of ours.

Despite all the dazzling color options we set out at the start of this tutorial, it’s quite surprising how many animals and birds are quite monochromatic on a safari.

Snowy white egrets, black crakes or storks, slate-grey elephants, rhinos, and hippos, and coal-colored buffaloes. These not only make great starting point species, triggering you to consider black and white, but they’re also the iconic subjects of much fine art African black and white imagery.

Imagine being able to set such wonderful subjects against complementary or completely contrasting mono backgrounds – for example, an elephant bull on the plains of Kenya with the swirling greys of a storm-cloud sky or against the white-out of a serious dust storm.

These are the sort of magical monochrome subjects your guide should alert you to.

When judging the potential for black and white wildlife on a game drive, you’re essentially looking out for strong contrast in both picture content and tones.

A good trick is to look beyond your subject as an individual species and break down the subject and scene into a series of shapes, lines, shadows, tones, and textures within the space in the frame.

Don’t overcomplicate things. Graphic simplicity lies at the heart of many successful black and white shots. Keep compositions clean and uncluttered and search out minimalist situations where a single animal or bird can be distinctly isolated or stand proud in lots of open space.

A case in point – few black and white wildlife shots are more striking than a silhouette where everything within the frame is pared right back to the bold raw contrast of dense black on white.

Read more: The Art of Minimalist Wildlife Photography

Consider the relationship between subject and background

Any location with a limited color palette can work fine as a background for a black and white wildlife image on safari, but bearing the need to keep contrast in mind, we prefer to hunt out open settings that can act as a stage on which our subjects can perform.

Habitats like plains, deserts, and grassland savannahs are common open landscapes on safari; great for the sort of blank canvas, studio-type plain backdrops that suit and set off black and white wildlife pictures.

Your backgrounds don’t have to be totally empty, of course. You can sometimes make excellent use of a visually appealing topographical feature to anchor your composition – giving a shot a sense of scale and emphasizing the feeling of isolation and space.

Consider those classic black and white shots of the Masai Mara where a lone subject is framed by a flat-topped umbrella thorn under a spreading sky; where a full-maned lion stands majestically atop a rocky outcrop, or a cheetah family poses prominently on a mound surveying the never-ending plain.

Cloud-filled or featureless, skies of all types can be great backgrounds for black and white on safari. Pay attention, however, to the placement of the horizon when framing. It generally looks more pleasing to give a sky either two-thirds or one-third of the image space.

If you bisect your shot with the horizon, it tends to look too symmetrical.

Read more: The Importance of Backgrounds

When conditions are ripe for black and white

One of the benefits of black and white on safari is the potential to get standout shots beyond the sweet light time, even when weather conditions are a little tough.

For example, if there’s a sudden rainstorm or the dust comes up, you should switch your thinking to black and white to underscore the implicit drama of such moments. When the light gets harsh, or it’s overcast, going mono means you can still get useful results.

In this case, doing some high-key shots in black and white with the right subjects isolated against a featureless sky or stretch of water can pay dividends – a flock of vultures on a dead tree perhaps or a pod of hippos breaking the surface.

To do this, you need to overexpose by around two full stops to enhance the lighter tones in the picture, keeping an eye on your histogram to ensure highlights on the subject aren’t blown (blown background highlights are less of a problem in high-key shots so don’t fret if you have clipping there).

And when the sun’s high and you’re almost ready to head back to the lodge for brunch, keep an eye out for the deep dark shadows it casts.

Too late for color for sure, yet converted to black and white, the extreme contrasts between light and dark might just give you one last keeper for your morning’s drive.

Overcast conditions are also the nudge for you to think black and white for another reason too. In these flat, shadowless conditions, you can render wonderfully rich detail and tonal range doing some black and white wildlife portraits.

Think of the fine fur detail in an extreme close-up of a lion’s face, for example, or a characterful bust of a bull elephant with beautiful detail on all his textured and gnarly features.

This doesn’t mean you can’t ever do a bit of black and white at the end of the day as the sun goes down.

When the sun is low and raking, think side lighting and black and white. This can create a wonderful play of contrasting shadows on wildlife subjects, sculpting their features beautifully.

We love shooting into the light and will always work hard to get around our subjects where possible so we can exploit the extreme contrasts backlighting can afford.

These shots very often work brilliantly rendered in black and white because they depend largely on strong contrast for success.

Read more: Backlighting in Wildlife Photography – Creative Use of Light

Exposure control for black and white

In most of the shooting scenarios outlined, you can dial up the black and white ‘wow’ factor of your shots instantly in the camera through the creative control of exposure – tweaking settings on the plus or minus scale of exposure compensation to amplify or modify how light or dark your shot will be.

A lot of the time for black and white wildlife, you will probably want to go darker, underexposing shots to ramp up contrast sometimes by one to two full stops – for example, to make storm skies more intensely brooding in a shot of an elephant herd crossing a dry lakebed.

On occasion, of course, shooting in mist, doing white-on-white images or when photographing subjects in high-key, you will want to go lighter, overexposing shots by a stop or two to favor lighter tones.

This is the way to become the master of mood in your mono safari pictures. For best results, aim to match the mood of your black and white treatment, and exposure tweaks, to your vision, message, or the story you want to tell about a subject.

For example, a mono shot of a hunting predator may look even more imposing where the dark brooding tones are enhanced. If you’re showcasing a leaping antelope, on the other hand, stressing the lighter tones will help reinforce the sense of your subject’s grace and agility.

With mirrorless cameras offering exposure simulation in the viewfinder, it’s much easier these days, and more fun, maximizing creative control as you shoot on safari in this way.

Read more: How to Master Exposure in Your Wildlife Photography

Post-processing tips for black and white photography

Although our approach is always to lock in what we can at the moment the image is conceived, there’s always a little tweaking required to convert and bring up our black and white pictures once we’re back from a trip.

There are lots of different ways to convert images to black and white, but our primary approach is to use Adobe Lightroom and occasionally Photoshop where we want to use layers.

Although in the past we have experimented with black and white presets to start the ball rolling and for inspiration, we now prefer to adjust each image individually until it marries with our initial concept.

Our black and white workflow doesn’t differ that much from our approach to color images once we’ve switched to the Black and White tab in Lightroom.

It’s mostly centered on a few fine adjustments to exposure, shadows, highlights, contrast, clarity, and a little dodging and burning.

Where things do differ in our treatment of mono shots is that we’re much bolder with tonal adjustments to achieve the aesthetic we’re looking for.

Surprisingly, we also use individual color adjustments more when processing in black and white where contrast is key.

For example, in a shot of a yellow lion in green grass, there’s the risk in black and white that the subject could get lost in the background.

Adjusting the luminosity of the two colors, so the greens are darker and the yellows are lighter, means we can get our lion to pop out again in the picture.

There’s more scope to experiment with tonal adjustment in the sky in a black and white shot too. In a color image, this can often look overdone and unreal.

Although we’re generally aiming for a range of tones, taking care to avoid clipping, there are situations with black and white pictures where clipping is less of an issue.

For example, there’s often no need to mind clipping and the loss of detail where you’re looking to create large areas of negative space in a minimalist mono shot.

Read more: The Basics of Editing Black and White Wildlife Photographs

In conclusion

Ultimately, there is really no right or wrong in this genre, and you may find with black and white photography on safari that you’ll learn what ‘look’ you want from your shots largely by trial and error, both at the capture stage and in the conversion.

The main thing is to have a go and discover the fun and rewards it can offer during your trip.

When you’re savouring all the amazing memories back home at the editing stage, you may realise that converting some of your images to black and white will make them even more impactful and memorable than if they remained in colour!

It can be a great way to help your content stand out in a world saturated by media, and it may even give you an edge if you’re thinking of entering photography competitions.